It’s obvious the Tipp lads were fitter and tougher, I think if you look at any subsequent sporting contests between the counties the results always favored Tipp.
This was the 15 you fielded in championship season 1838
Nov 3, 1838
The latest murder in the county of Tipperary is that of Mr. Charles O’Keefe.
The Nenagh Guardian received this morning bring intelligence of violent
assault… The peasantry about Mr. Ashton Yates’s New Atlantis, the blessed
district of Borrisokane, are preparing by drilling of their forces. The
list of murders in Tipperary between 21st of July, 1838 and the 27th of
Oct., 1838.
I saw that when I was a young lad! They were brilliant. I remember my grandmother fainting watching it. Was all a bit too much for her. That line about your man with the thin skull stuck with me.
Police reports are littered with deaths from fractured skulls in 1830s/1840s… Belt of a rock usually… Clare, Tipp, Limerick having recorded the highest levels of such activity…
As well as clan/family fights, you had a class element also and big farmers and small farmers often despised each other and battered the fuck out of each other… the three-year-olds v the four-year-olds were just some of the names they took on over the years… The original class element kicked off in Waterford and South Tipp between the caravats and shanavests…of course, and as that article on Capawhite says, some people just loved to fight back then also… The local priest in Toomevara was writing to Dublin Castle for help every week in around 1843/44… They told him to shove his thumb up his hole.
I remember reading about a 4 day battle in Doon in the 1840s… Some lad with a bit of drink was roaring and shouting about the three-year-olds when someone shut him up with a rock and smashed his skull. It was running battles for 4 days as the four-year-olds came for revenge…the police could do nothing without military support as both sides would turn on them if they got involved.